Chopper recumbents in New Mexico - Steve Briggs

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Very High Gears Because the recumbent rolls at a higher speed with comparable effort, exceptionally high gear ratios are employed. It has a five speed set of conventional derailleur gears utilizing a chain wheel with 60 teeth. Several gear ratio choices with over 100 are available. The gear shifting lever is at the center of the handlebar. Eight ounce rims, silk tires aluminum parts wherever possible, and egg shell thin tubing are many of the refinements that make the bike a very lively and responsive machine. The gross weight is within a few pounds of the conventional racing bike. “So long for now I’ll wait for you at the coffee shop.” This article was originally published in American Cycling Magazine 1968 Article by Dan Henry. Photos by Victor Hirschfield. Scanned by Mark Colliton from photocopies of the original magazine article Dan Henry and wedgie rider chat. Note dual suspension and remote above-seat steering—photo circa 1968 Dan’s recumbent seat consisted of an inverted drop bar, homebuilt seat back with mesh from a lawn chair Coventry Cycle Works Oregon’s Recumbent Headquarters • Easy Racers • Vision • BikeE • Haluzak • Lightning • RANS 2025 SE Hawthorne Portland, Oregon 97214 Tel. 503/230-7723 www.coventrycycle.com JAY’S PEDAL POWER BIKES 512 E. GIRARD AVE, PHILA., PA Tel. 215-425-5111 • Fax. 215-426-2653 We offer products from Vision, Linear, BikeE, Rans, Haluzak, Easy Racers, Santana and many more. We ship worldwide. Many models in stock now. FREE catalog by request. www.jayspedalpower.com 26
INTERVIEW Recumbent Anthology Gardner Martin of Easy Racers, Inc. by Kelvin Clark This interview takes place late evening, poolside, at the Flamingo Hilton Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada in September 1999. Bob Bryant & Ron Schmid are lurking in the shadows and I’m visiting with Gardner Martin. — Kelvin Kelvin: Gardner, tells us about the bike that you have here tonight. Gardner: Well, I needed a run around bike when I got to Las Vegas. I looked at what was available and said, “Hell, I’ll take the old Dead Mans bike.” Dead Man’s bike was the first Gold Rush. I’ll tell you the story about Dead Man’s bike. In about 1983, a dentist in Ohio called me up and wanted to buy a Tour Easy like he’d seen on TV. So I sold him the Tour Easy and probably three years later he called up. At that time I had very close contact with most of my customers because I wasn’t making a lot of bikes per year. He said, “Gardner, my wife just died and I am just really distraught and I don’t know what to do with myself.” He had been a lifelong bicyclist, belonged to one of the biggest clubs in Ohio and bicycling was the only thing he had left. “Gardner, is there something special you could do for me, you know, a really special recumbent “Well, Doc, you know we built this here aluminum bike to race with the Streamline bodywork and I could probably make you one like it—but it’s going to cost you! “Well, I don’t care what it cost.” So I built him the first “for sale” aluminum bike, which at that time we didn’t even call the Gold Rush because we hadn’t named our speed bike the Gold Rush yet. The actual speed bike that won the DuPont prize had an identical chassis to this bike. Maybe three years later I got a call, hadn’t heard from him in a good while, except that he one time called me and told me he was going to some big bike races, but boy, things weren’t going well for him. He’d wrecked his truck—fallen asleep once and I think he just couldn’t get his head back together after his wife died. He still had the club, so one day he was out riding with the club members, and they were probably twenty, thirty miles into the ride and he had a minor heart attack. They called 911 and got an ambulance out there and took him back. Two weeks later he went out by himself and they found him dead along the side of the road with his feet still in the toe clips. What I think happened was that he just decided he wanted to go join his wife and he went out and pedaled hard ‘til his old heart blew up. It’s happened in lots of cases where the one mate dies and the other one is just, you know, it just kills their spirit, they just don’t want to live anymore. So that’s why we called it the Dead Man’s bike. So I bought it back and I offered it to my wife. Said, “This’ll be your bike.” She said, “Yeah, yeah I can kind of dig that.” But there was something kind of hesitant about it, you know, later on she just told me that she didn’t want to ride a dead man’s bike. It was her bike for quite a few years but she never rode it. I tried to use it around the shop but it wasn’t quite late model enough to use as a demonstrator. All of the equipment is fairly “old tack.” Kelvin: Gardner then phases into a BioPace moment... Gardner: It’s got Frank Berto’s half step plus granny gearing and BioPace chainrings on it. Some people think the BioPace doesn’t work. I think the BioPace can be a help on hills on recumbents. Maybe it doesn’t work so well on an upright bike, it will induce a pogo effect because you are pedaling in the same plane as the up and down suspension of the bike whether it’s natural suspension or fully articulated. On a recumbent bike, you’re pedaling horizontally and you’re opposed to any up and down motion, you don’t get what’s been termed “biopacing.” Our office manager (Luke) actually still has one old Tour Easy that he rides regularly that has the BioPace. We gave him a brand new Tour Easy a couple of years ago and he rides them both probably almost equally. He thinks the BioPace is a little easier to climb the steep hills when he is down in the extreme chain rings, so it just goes to show that sometimes a fad can be successful and it can also be killed by opinion that may or may not be right for everything. Kelvin and his super deluxe MC 2 SWB Kelvin: The Gold Rush went into production in ’86 then Gardner: We won the DuPont prize in ’86 and we decided in ’87 to make it a real production item although we had built a few for customers that wanted something lighter than the Tour Easy or our original Easy Racer. We incorporated in 1979 to build recumbent bicycles. The original Easy Racer was all hand brazed and mitered. It looks like a Tour Easy but more complicated joints. We had nicely tapered chain stays, used Campagnolo drop outs, silver soldering and hand brazing. We built somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 to 120 of the original hand built Easy Racer models before we brought out the Tour Easy. The Tour Easy was launched in 1982. We had been racing for four years at the International Human Powered Vehicle Championships. I’m kind of taking you back further and further with what I would call the modern revolution in recumbency. It really all started in 1974 when I walked into a liquor store looking for my favorite copy of Big Bike Motorcycle Magazine. At that time I was building custom parts for motorcycles, making gas tanks and fairings. I was interested in both the chopper scene and the road racing scene. I probably owned what were absolutely the best and fastest motorcycles that were ever built up through the early 70’s. I owned a Harley Davidson and a super custom, super fast Norton at that time. I previously owned several brand new racing Triumphs and I owned the absolute ultimate motorcycle of all time—the Vincent Black Shadow. I was really into the motorcycles, but there in the liquor store magazine rack beside my favorite copy of Big Bike was a bicycling magazine with a streamline bicycle on the cover and the title of the article was, “Are Streamline Bicycles in Your Future”, by Dr. Chester Kyle. I never bought a bicycling magazine before, I was into hot rods, dragsters and fast “motorcycles.” So I picked it up. The gist of the article was, Chester Kyle, a professor at Long Beach State, with the help of his students in an engineering class, built a streamline fairing for a conventional upright racing bicycle. It was a Teledyne type titanium bicycle and he got a current Olympic champion, Ron Scarren, to ride this thing. They went out and broke a bunch of speed records. Broke all the 200 meter, 500 meter, 1000 meter, 1 mile speed records that had been set on conventional bikes, which by this time had surpassed the earlier recumbent streamliner records. So they went 44 mph, which was maybe two to three miles and hour faster than the current sprint record at the time. It sounded exciting. He proposed the idea, “Let’s have anything goes speed contest race in the spring of 1975.” I thought, “Wow, man—this sounds neat.” I started drawing some pictures. I took some pictures of a regular road racing bicycle in the magazine and rotated it 90 degrees until I had him lying on his belly and I said, “ you know, I can get him about half as tall or half the frontal area if I put him flat on his belly. I knew what streamlining did at high speeds. The air resistance is 95 percent of your energy to overcome it —its speed, or more. So I said, “If I can build something half as high with half the frontal area, I ought to be able to go twice as fast.” Okay, maybe not twice as fast, but certainly exceed the speed record. So in the spring of ’75 thirteen crazy guys in their thirteen weird machines showed up at a drag strip down in Irwindale, California—Irwindale Raceway. The old professor won because nobody else quite had their vehicles working right, so Ron Scarren upped his record to maybe 45 mph and one other prone machine, Dr. Alan Abbott, got second place. He was really fast. And he just had partial streamlining but flat on his belly. My bike had the distinction of having the first high speed crash. We had three different riders, one of them a real bicyclist but not a racer, and the 27
Page 1 and 2: Issue # 59 Sept/Oct 2000 Chopper Re
Page 3 and 4: The Larry Scott Trail looking back
Page 5 and 6: For those of you who have been wond
Page 7 and 8: Happenings 2000 September 9th Satur
Page 9 and 10: Telling the Truth We are recent sub
Page 11 and 12: The 2000 Angletech Altitude a.k.a.
Page 13 and 14: Angletech’s head badge Aluminum s
Page 15 and 16: THE WORLD OF HPB’S Human Powered
Page 17 and 18: The Hobie is steered via a cable-ac
Page 19 and 20: The Nauticraft Escapade: A Sea-Goin
Page 21 and 22: How about TWICE the fun The Greensp
Page 23 and 24: problem” T-shirt: (sheepishly)
Page 25: The Recumbent Bicycle by Dan Henry
Page 29 and 30: guys on the national sprint team an
Page 31: out here. Well he got into this thi
Page 36: Easy Racers: Our Customers Speak An

Chopper recumbents in New Mexico - Steve Briggs

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